One characteristic of contemporary politics is that your opponent is not simply wrong but stupid. For one side, this stupidity stems from a lack of education: if only graduates voted, there would be no Trump, no Brexit. For the other side, those same universities churn out what Newt Gingrich, following Nassim Taleb, called “Intellectuals Yet Idiots”, a generation who have studied themselves thick, adrift in a sea of capital-T “Theory”.
Seeing politics in terms of stupidity has far-reaching consequences. The mass of opposing voters are considered fools: at best naive dupes, at worst blind to all reason. At the same time, opposing economists, think tanks and so on are surely too intelligent to believe anything so manifestly idiotic – hence they must have some sinister, concealed agenda. Ironically, a tendency to see each other in terms of these tropes, the mass of fools and the leadership of conspirators, was one of the few communalities between Brexiteers and Remainers. Needless to say, such framing does not foster democratic dialogue.
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